Capítulo 20: 9
The look in Esau's eyes told me all that I needed to know.
"You saw the vision." It was not a question.
"I did." I nodded.
"You're worried."
"I am concerned, yes."
"How much did you see?"
"I saw the Ork Warlord attack a ship called a 'Craftworld', then escape said ship, accidentally get flung into the warp, where he fought off a group of creatures called daemons before he landed on this planet." That was a lot, less than I had seen, but it was a lot. I sighed.
"I saw more than that. Orks, as I have found out, do not dwell on their memories often. Still, I saw a lot. I saw how Ork culture, such as it is, functions. I saw the machines they built and the miracles that they have managed over a dozen worlds. I saw some of their enemies as well, and what I saw has me worried." I looked over at where Kov and Kha were on the floor, just outside the door, staring up at me. "Are they alright?"
I walked towards them and saw him calm down in the corner of my eye. Had he thought that I would attack him or them?
"They are alright. I made sure of it." He said as he helped me pull them off the floor. I looked them over, he wasn't lying. Despite having been moved across the room at high speed, they were relatively unharmed. They would have bruises - painful ones- but they would be alright.
"Thank you for helping me out." I said, as soon as I got them up."And I'm sorry I put you all in danger. It was selfish of me to insist on the enhancements without taking more time to look at every possibility."
"No problem. There is no need to be sorry." Kov said. The transfer of knowledge had Kov knowing English but his grasp on the spoken language was still a bit shaky. His grammar was perfect but he had accents on the wrong syllables. It reminded me of when Esau first learnt English in fact. "Helping you get strong helps sachem, and helps all of us."
"It gives us more options to work with in case of emergency." Kha said. "The Great One has warned us of the coming greenskins. Having more than one powerful member of this house will allow us to live longer. A few bruises is a small price to pay for increased security."
"On that note," She said as she took my hand into hers. "Let us see what the changes have wrought."
The holes in her eye sockets that had once housed her eyes started to glow. Instead of the usual blue ethereal glow, the light was a hazy green. She was obviously seeing something, as her facial expression changed. She went from her usual serene demeanour to an almost hunched over stance as her face scrunched up and her bottom jaw suddenly pronounced. It was as if she had become an Ork herself. Her abilities still creeped me out but I couldn't debate the usefulness of them. As long as she wasn't trying to draw from the 'Great Ocean' as she had when we met her though, I figured that there was no point in trying to stop her.
She convulsed, still standing, as she let go of me, signalling the end of her vision. This had been a heavy one. Over the last ten days, I had the dubious pleasure of seeing her abilities being used at various intensities. The work of helping me build the garden had been barely taxing for her. Looking over the essence collected from the Drukhari-Ork battlefield was intense, with some driving her to the floor at a mere touch.
She had an advanced form of psychometry. While her previous connection to the 'Great Ocean' was unusable, her psychometry was at a new height. Just a single touch and she could tell details about an object and its history. The more complete an object, and the older the object, the more she could tell. Apparently much of the essence Esau collected was Human life essence along with various alien races none of us could name. Literal years of life, collected during or after bouts of torture by the Drukhari.
Every time you thought that the Drukhari couldn't possibly be worse, they proved you wrong.
As she stopped convulsing and came back to lucidity, the glow lessened and then disappeared. I let her relax as she came down. Over the few times I had seen her have visions, I had learnt that it was best to let her process them before she spoke about what she had seen. So I waited.
It still felt like a huge ethical violation to use the life essence, much less life essence collected so painfully. But I had a feeling, an instinct, that told me that it would work. Esau's DNA had a supernatural element to it, and so did the DNA of the Drukhari, I couldn't decipher the supernatural element of the DNA with the time and equipment I had available to me, so I had to make a few educated guesses to fill in that gap. The closest thing I had access to was the essence collected by the Drukhari. It was still a gamble, because I couldn't possibly have deciphered everything about the essence. Here, Kha was a godsend. Without her, I would have chosen any number of essences that could have resulted in my death or worse.
She started speaking. Over the last few days, I had learnt that immediately following a vision, it was best to let her speak her mind. If we didn't, the memories of the vision would pass and we would be back at square one.
"I saw a single green beast, engaged in violence, across the stars. This beast fought, and killed and stole. I saw it beat and subjugate other green beasts. I saw it order its fellows to bring down monuments once thought eternal, and I saw it roar in celebration over the bodies of man, woman and child alike. I saw the order for the creation of great machines of destruction. I saw it ride across the stars in a war with everyone and with everything. I saw it when it landed on this planet, most of its organs crushed by the impact. I saw it run at the Dark Ones, and I saw it die an ignoble death, felling a great beast of metal and flesh." She took a breath and she stared at me with her hollow, eyeless sockets.
"I see it now, as it watches me. I see you, dreadful one." Ah, shit. I saw Esau's hackles rise in the corner of my eye, as she returned to normal.
"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Do you mean that the essence of the beast has taken over my father's body?"
His tone was steady and calm, but to me, it might as well have been apoplectic. It was as the room had become ten degrees colder. She looked over at him.
"No, Great One. The beast is dead, but it's essence is not." she said.
"Explain." was all he said in reply.
"All creatures are connected to the Great Ocean. You, me, Kov and your father. Our connections differ, but they exist all the same. The greenskins similarly have a connection to the Great Ocean. Theirs however, does not exist in the same way we connect to the Great Ocean." At this point, she was getting visibly more animated.
"Instead of directly connecting to the Great Ocean itself, they connect to each other, then the group itself seems to connect to the Great Ocean. I need not tell you that the Great Ocean is a perilous place. To connect to it, you need the talent of the wytch and you need a mind like a fortress. I need not tell you that greenskins do not have minds like fortresses. This connection means that each greenskin draws from the Great Ocean through a connection more stable than any one person ever could."
"So all Orks are wytches?" Esau asked. "I do not see how this applies to my Father."
"I do not think that is correct." I said, stepping in. "In my vision, I saw Orks that specifically specialised in using magic. The Orks call them 'Weirdboyz'."
"Charming." Kov said, the first time he spoke since Kha's vision. I stifled a laugh. Kov did not speak often, but the kid had a very dry sense of humour.
"Your father is correct." Kha said, displeased. "The greenskins are all connected to the Great Ocean but not all of them are wytches. The greenskin 'Weirdboyz' are the only wytches equivalents that they have access to, though I hesitate to call anything they might do wytchcraft."
"I still do not see how this relates to my Father." Esau said.
"All greenskins are connected to the Great Ocean. The life essence that we used, contained the life essence of the leader of all of the greenskins that landed on this planet. The Great Ocean, when drawn from, affects reality. The greenskins work via a hierarchy whereby the biggest greenskin is the leader. Or is it that the leader is the biggest greenskin?" she said.
"The chicken or the egg." I said, seeing where she was going. Everyone turned to me.
"What?" Kha asked.
"The chicken or the egg, It's a popular thought experiment where I'm from. A chicken is a small flightless bird that lays eggs. The chicken lays eggs, but the chicken comes from one. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's used to describe similar situations to the one you're describing, where the origin of one thing must come, logically, from some other thing in an infinite cycle."
Kha seemed to be turning over the idea in his head.
"Yes. That works. The chicken or the egg. Was the leader large because it was the leader or was it the leader because it was large? The answer here is largely irrelevant. The point is that the greenskin's relationship to the Great Ocean means either or both could be true."
"Because their collective power would make it so." Esau said, the answer dawning on him.
"Yes." Kha said. "This means that either way, the leader of the greenskins had a high concentration of energy from the Great Ocean within him, filtered through greenskin consciousness when it died."
"Then he had his essence absorbed by the Drukhari." Esau said, looking at me.''Before we treated my father with it."
"Precisely." Kha said. "All this power, absorbed by your father. This changed him, or rather his connection with the Great Ocean. As far as the Great Ocean is concerned, your father is not human, he is a greenskin."
"What does that mean exactly?" I asked, before Esau could interject. "For me, I mean. Will I be turning into an Ork or something?"
"No, I do not think so. The Great Ocean has no limit, but the amount of energy you absorbed was limited. You have gained the presence of the greenskins in the Great Ocean, and the protections this provides, as far as I can tell. What else this may mean, I do not know." That was reassuring.
"Perhaps we can get a better look at the changes that this has had on your body through the MAM, Father?" Esau, suggested. I agreed. It was best to see if there were any unwanted changes as soon as possible.
I stood in the MAM scanning area for twenty minutes before I was called out. As soon as I left the scanning area, Esau motioned for me to look at one of the screens.
The screen showed the anatomy of three beings. One was Esau's, with the myriad of organs and implants he had. The second showed the general orkoid physical profile, built up from multiple scans of various Ork bodies found on the battlefield. The third showed my physique.
A quick look showed me that nothing was wrong. The implants had integrated properly and were working as they should, but a more critical look at things showed me that there was more happening. The implants had not only started working as intended, they were working better than intended. I still wasn't at Esau's level, in terms of processing ability, though at my current processing speed, the difference was largely academic. My bones and muscles were also growing nicely. I was already twenty centimetres above where I was, at 1.9 metres tall. The problem was, my implants were working a bit too well.
"My muscle development is irregular." I said, I looked over the figures before me again. "And so is my mental development."
"But 'irregular' was what we were looking for, correct?" Kov said.
"Yes, but we were looking at 'irregular' as in, growth over the space over a few weeks, not over the span of a few hours." Esau responded. He pointed to a cross section of the Polymath Gland. "This implant is stimulating far more growth than expected, even with the Ork essence taken into account. In addition, the mass seems to appear from nowhere."
I racked my mind. In the visions, I would see Warlord Gritzz get bigger after fighting. Gritzz himself never cared about how he got bigger, he just enjoyed the fact that he could boss around smaller Orks because he was bigger than them.
"Pull up a scan of the Orks' endocrine system please, Esau." Esau pulled one up. The most readily available explanation for a sudden change in size among Orks is that the Orks believe that the biggest should be the leader, which in turn makes their leader bigger. However, another explanation was that the Orks also had an endocrine system that responded to long and sustained periods of violence by making the Ork in question bigger and stronger.
I looked over the endocrine system. I was right. Orks had multiple organs that seemed to respond to long periods of physical exertion or pressure by making them bigger.
"Pull up a scan of the Orks' nervous and lymphatic systems, too please." It seemed that long periods of violence would make them smarter and more resistant to disease as well. Christ.
"The Orks have multiple systems regulating their sizes, none of which are in the head." I pointed to the implant in my head. "And yet, this implant is mimicking Ork growth instead of Esau's growth. My muscles aren't forming the same way that Esau's are. The end result is the same in the end but somehow, my implant is producing modified orkoid hormones to allow for quick muscle growth and skeletal growth. In an Ork, the growth would be temporary unless under sustained pressure."
"But because the Regenerator and the structures of the implant that were copied from me stimulate permanent muscle growth, your growth is permanent." Esau continued. I nodded.
"Yes."
"That could be a problem."
"Potentially. Except, one of the structures I could decipher from you was a built in limiter to prevent overgrowth and the possibility of something like cancer from occuring. That should limit my growth after a certain point."
"But we don't know where that point is." Esau said in response, before something struck him.
"Actually, we do." he said, correcting himself. "It should be when your growth hits the theoretical limit of mine."
"That makes sense. Ork muscles have a far less efficient power to muscle ratio than you though, which would make my limit still quite a bit below yours." I scratched my chin, as I thought it through.
"Whatever," I said, eventually. "That would still put me far above any threat I could think of on a physical level. Still, we need to look at how the ork essence affected my other implants." Luckily, it seemed that the only implant that mutated, was the implant in my brain. When put that way it didn't seem lucky, but the mutation seemed to only increase the speed of my growth.
The speed of my growth roughly translated to the growth of an Ork that was being subjected to high amounts of physical trauma. This looked like the direct result of a mix of the Ork essence and the mutability formula along with my Forge granted physique. In a year or so, I would reach the limit of my growth, and I was ok with that. All I wanted to do was keep up with Esau, and now I could. By any ordinary merit, my achievement was immense. Apparently, the Forge agreed.
[Action: Create and Implant Organs based off of the Genome of the II Legion Primarch.
Reward: Reverse Engineering (Worm)]
I breathed out as the Forge connected and gave me a new skill. I now had an increased instinct for reverse engineering. I was already pretty capable due to my intellect, but now I could see that I had many mistakes in the process of reverse engineering Esau's organs. If I had this skill earlier, the result would likely have largely been the same but I would have arrived at this point faster, perhaps with more resources to draw from.
As it was, I was making connections between pieces of technology that I never thought to make. I could right now, at this very moment, with the resources available to me, recreate almost every piece of technology I had seen since I first got to this planet. I could build and mess with the build gun, the MAMs and most of the Drukhari technology that was available to me. I would have made the connections, given time, but with this new ability along with my increased processing speed, I was forming and dismissing hypotheses as quickly as this new technology came to me. As my mind ran through possibilities of the technologies that I had come into contact with, I came to one important conclusion.
"The Orks were artificially made." The suddenness of the exclamation surprised both Kov and Kha, but Esau caught on almost immediately.
"The Forge?" he asked. I nodded. Both Kov and Kha had been informed of the Forge and how I had been gaining abilities so after some more time explaining what the ability I had gotten was, they understood why I had changed subjects so quickly.
"So what do you mean, they were artificially made?" Esau asked, reminding me of my exclamation.
"I mean that all their traits, when put together make no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. In the case of the Orks, they reproduce in large numbers asexually extremely quickly, have a natural inclination for violence, are connected to the Great Ocean," I nodded to Kha. "They reproduce very fast and can build up technology that takes humans decades to develop in a matter of a few years."
"They don't just modify existing technology?" Esau asked, derailing my train of thought. "I saw a variety of conflicting designs in the Ork technology we got our hands on."
"They do." I conceded. "And Ork 'Mekboyz' also come up with technology wholesale and modify technology in ways you or I would be hard pressed to achieve. I don't know if it's because of their connection to the Great Ocean, but they can come up with breathtaking examples of technology, if the technology doesn't explode first. I've seen it, and so has Kha."
Kha nodded in agreement and Esau beckoned me to continue.
"In addition, Orks don't teach each other anything. A bigger Ork tells a smaller Ork what to do and the smaller Ork does it, no questions asked. Usually. In any other culture, this would result in permanent stagnation, but somehow, there are enough Orks in the galaxy that Gritzz met at least two independent spacefaring Ork communities. Some of these traits, like their quick reproduction would be something I could see a species developing after years of evolution but everything all together at once tells me that the Orks were made artificially."
Esau scratched his ear, his face arrayed in what I had come to know as his thinking face.
"Why would someone want to engineer something as destructive as the Orks?" Kov asked.
"I would wager that the Orks were created as a weapon in the first place. If thought about that way, everything makes sense. All you would need is a single spore and in time you would have a planet filled with rabid creatures that want nothing more than to inflict violence."
"And their lack of intelligence would make them easy to control." Kha said, in agreement.
"Would it?" Esau said, disagreeing. "It seems to me that having unintelligent subordinates as your fighters seems idiotic. If a fighter cannot think and plan, there is no point in them being a fighter, because they will always lose."
"That's just it, Esau. Orks aren't dumb." That got me three looks of doubt. Fair enough. Kov had almost no actual contact with orkoid culture and even he could see that the average Ork was an idiot from all the evidence created. " That's fair, but what if I told you that in addition to getting stronger as a result of outside pressures, Orks get smarter as well?"
I brought up various scans of orkoid nerve clusters and endocrine systems.
"These are organs that respond to trauma by releasing hormones that cause muscle growth. These very same organs also release hormones that encourage mental development. The more stressed an Ork is, the smarter it gets. This makes an Ork the perfect weapon."
"That is a disturbing thought." Esau admitted. We all nodded in agreement.
"So we have these creatures surrounding us?" Kov asked.
"Most likely." I admitted.
"Then don't we need to prepare?" Kov asked. We did. Now that we had confirmed that I was okay, the next thing to do was to shore up our defences. Before that though, it was best to improve our technologies.
First things first, I improved the build gun. I scanned it using the MAM so that we could fabricate more build guns. I then improved its scanning abilities by adding onto it using scanning technology taken from Drukhari technologies, allowing for the build guns to scan machinery and resources from distances up to a kilometre in any direction.
While Esau and I were not able to make heads or tails of the dimensional storage technology in the build gun, even with my newest ability, we were able to expand what it could build somewhat. Instead of buildings in general, and some miscellaneous items, we were able to expand it to include vehicles, armour and weapons, as long as they had been scanned by a MAM.
Quite a few items were destroyed by the crash and the subsequent fight that the Drukhari had had with the Orks, and more that I considered biological risks, but we still had tons of options to choose from. I gave Esau an improved build gun and let him and Kov go to work, shoring up our defences, while Kha and I worked to fix broken weapons and scan workable ones for use by Esau as weapons options.
In terms of melee weapons, almost all the knives, spears and chains were already scanned so I worked on the melee weapons that held machinery. One of which was a clawed gauntlet, with syringes above where the knuckles were, that held a variety of painful drugs that would mutate anyone they were injected to. I decided to store the designs and then devise countermeasures, in case we ever had to come into contact with any living Drukhari. In terms of ranged weapons, we only really had access to two designs we could reverse engineer. One was a pistol that used compressed air to shoot a variety of acids and poisons at a target. The other was a set of guns that all seemed to be focused around shooting crystals at speeds exceeding Mach one along an electromagnetic rail.
These crystals were filled with a variety of deadly toxins which would kill most living creatures over a long period of time, leaving them in excruciating pain in the process. In other words, they were poison railguns in a variety of configurations, including a pistol and a rifle. There were more configurations but those were destroyed in battle with the Orks. We also made a gun that when shot at a living being, would age the living being to dust. We made this weapon as effective as we could, making it as human as possible, but this would likely be a painful process for whoever was shot.
These weapons, Esau rigged up as turrets lining the twenty five metre tall walls he was devising, pointing down at our potential enemies.
In terms of armour, we only had one usable design, made out of a strong enough material. The carapace like armour on the creatures that had felled the Ork warboss. We had to reconfigure it somewhat for the material to fit on a humanoid figure but eventually we did it. Neither Kha or I were craftsmen so we fell far short of the most optimal design, but in the end, we came up with chainmail armour that used the carapace to protect the more vital areas of the human body. For helmets, we modified the strange cone shaped helmets that some Drukhari wore into something sturdier, with some material to cushion the head.
We also had only one working vehicle to reverse engineer, a hoverbike of some kind. That didn't take much effort to work on, with the real boon being the hover tech and power supplies, which were stupidly efficient, allowing the bike to float and move at speeds upwards of 150 kilometres per hour.
Soon we were done, after a day working on and off, on the technology before I decided to take another look at Ork technology. I immediately regretted it. Some technology was workable but those were pretty much ordinary pistols and flamethrowers which Esau incorporated into the walls. The rest was infuriating. Most technology didn't work at all or had a worrying propensity to destroy itself, while some technology only worked in my hands, likely due to my connection to the Ork equivalent of the Great Ocean.
After two days banging my head against the technology, I decided to work on deciphering the Ork genome.
The Orks clearly had some sort of genetic memory, and I was going to unlock it. Even if some of this technology only worked in Ork hands or had strange methods of operation, unlocking even a small portion of it would be a great boon. It took two more days of working on this before I realised that the MAM scans simply wouldn't cut it. I needed more samples, and better scans of them, before I could decipher anything of note.
In that time, Esau had finished the wall, a twenty-five metre tall grey monstrosity adorned with turrets at various heights up the wall. Esau had also done the courtesy of planting a series of mines surrounding the wall at locations that the turrets couldn't properly swivel to. In addition to this, Esau and Kov had worked on a series of maintenance drones that would fix any failing machinery while refilling its ammunition.
Seeing what I was working on, and agreeing that it would be a huge boon, Esau suggested that we look for Drukhari technology to upgrade our scanners further in the crashed ship. I couldn't argue with that logic, so I made preparations to make the trip. Technically, I didn't need to make the physical trip at all. But since there were the bodies of three humans to bury, and Esau was done with the wall, I figured that it was time to bring them here, where they would be properly buried.
I got my new carapace armour ready, along with a splinter pistol, a build gun and my omnitool. I would be accompanied on the trip by ten of Esau's drones, while Esau himself stayed to guard the monstrosity we called a wall.
Despite my lingering paranoia that I would be attacked by a random Ork on the way, no attack came and I made it to the Drukhari ship in an uneventful trip. I made my way through the winding corridors of the ship, until I came upon the room we had found Kha and Kov in. I walked in and saw something that made my breath hitch.
The bodies were gone.
Notes:
8.1. Perk(s) earned this chapter:
Domain: Knowledge: Reverse Engineering - Reverse Engineering (Worm) (400CP): While you still possess an amount of scientific knowledge beyond the curve of modern society, your base technical knowledge is far less than other Tinkers. This is however because your power lets you reverse engineer the principles and workings of anything you can get your hands on, and then apply that knowledge and understanding to your own work. Just seeing a device and watching it function gives you a vague idea as to how it works, and examining something means you can derive the hows and whys as to its functions. This requires time and effort on your part, in addition to the time and resources it'll take to actually implement this new knowledge, but as long as you put in the necessary investment you can always understand virtually any new technology. Your Tinker abilities will continue to expand as you gain access to new technology and knowledge, with potentially no upper limit as long as you can keep gaining samples to work with.
Chapter 9: Interlude 3 - Kha, Isaac, ?
-Kha
Kha sat, deep in meditation, feeling for the Great One's aura as he stood upon the construction he and the boy, Kov had worked on for days on end. They had designed and redesigned the walls of the fort until they had settled on a pentagonal design, with turrets at each point overlooking the wasteland outside the walls. The turrets had almost no stopping power, relative to the guns she had encountered fighting the gangs on Tectum, but being based on the designs of the Dark Ones, they were sure to be deadly. At various points along the walls, between the turrets were flamers, which would set alight any who had gotten past both the mines and the turrets that protected the wall.
Kha hated mines. Many a sister wytch had died during an assault on a ganger stronghold as a result of them, before her coven adapted countermeasures to spot and circumvent them. Most mines had mechanisms against tampering designed with knowledge from before the Dark Night so even the more mechanically inclined members of the covens were rendered useless. She had been fortunate in her disciplines being so…varied. Electromancy and telekinesis weren't the most powerful disciplines but they were versatile. Electromancy allowed her to trigger traps with electric mechanisms, while telekinesis allowed her to trigger mines at great distances. This was without their obvious uses in combat.
She missed her abilities, but she knew that she was never going to get them back. What the Great Ocean takes, it can never give back. That was the credo of the ritualist. The Great Ocean had taken her power and her eyes, she had been fortunate that was all that had been taken. More so, in fact, because it had vastly amplified her wytch sight.
Where it was barely worth mentioning, just barely allowing her to see the larger waves of the Great Ocean, she could now see the little currents and tides in her immediate vicinity. The currents were so clear now, that she could almost follow them to their source, allowing her to see the history of almost every object she came across. The more history an object had, the more she could see. And with her enhanced wytch sight, she had seen sights that even the Old Crone would have been amazed by.
With her new sight, she could see the Great One's presence in the Great Ocean. He was a golden beacon attracting and repelling the touch of the inhabitants of the Great Ocean in equal measure. His power was such that his mere presence had kept the tides from overwhelming her in her divinations. It astounded her that the Great One was unaware of this ability, but then again, did a star know that its radiance nourished the beings beneath its light?
So much power, but now that his father had forbidden him from attempting to access it, it stayed as it was untapped. A waste of talent, perhaps. But Kha found herself agreeing with Isaac, despite his madness.
What could it be, besides madness, that would cause a man to experiment with his body as Isaac had done in his desperate attempt to match his son? That he had succeeded did not make him less mad, just fortunate.
Despite his madness, Isaac was correct to cut off Esau's attempts to draw from the Great Ocean, because as Kha was coming to realise, the tides of the Great Ocean on this planet were tainted. She had thought it was because of the death of the Dark Ones and the Greenskins tainting the Great Ocean as rampant death and destruction were wont to do. She was wrong, in the days since she had been brought to her new home, she had seen enough to be certain that this malignance surrounded the tides of the mountains surrounding them, if not the entire planet.
It wasn't a malignance caused by death, that was something she was well acquainted with. This was a malignance caused by the denial of it. She had seen it only once before, but even with her subpar wytch sight at the time, the feel of it was difficult to mistake. One tended not to forget the feel of necromantic arts after being exposed to them, after all.
The problem was finding out where it was being practised precisely.
The Great One was passively staving off this malignance and so was Isaac, now that his presence in the Great Ocean had been changed. Another stroke of fortune that Isaac had stumbled upon, with her help. This had kept them all safe, but it had also meant it was difficult to pinpoint the origin of the malignance itself, protected as she was against it. It also meant that it was difficult to ascertain the strength of it.
Was there a single necromancer, performing great feats? Or was there a whole cadre performing minor ones?
Kha couldn't tell.
It was moments like these that made her feel weak, useless. The only talents available to her were ones she was unfamiliar with, as was the case of her divinations, or those that were dangerous to perform, in the case of her rituals.
Her soul had survived the consequences of a failed ritual, she was unwilling to try another one again.
She stood up, ending her meditations. She had to inform Isaac and the Great One of her findings, minor as they were.
Isaac had left, to collect the bodies of the humans she had been interred with on the ship of the Dark Ones. Kha had not approved of this action as Isaac had left. Wall or not, the greenskins posed a potential threat that the Great One could not deal with alone. Now that she had meditated on the tides of the Great Ocean, she saw the prudence in his actions, even as accidental as they were. Dead bodies left to rot, should the stasis pods fail, would end in their corruption in an environment such as the one surrounding them.
She found the Great One with the boy, Kov on top of the walls, reviewing designs of their defences. Kov hadn't gotten over her use of her talents on the ship, it seemed as he flinched with every step she took toward them. Kha was saddened, but she understood. She hadn't been in her right mind then and she had let the Great Ocean flow through her, unabated. That was more than even the most reasonable individuals could deal with. She was fortunate that he understood her rage, and had defaulted to fear, instead of hatred as many had on Tectum.
She greeted them, with a slight nod of her head as was custom on Tectum.
"Great One." she said in greeting. "I bring news of the dangers that may be surrounding us."
"Will the Orks be attacking soon?" he asked.
"No, Great One. This is another threat entirely." She saw the boy, Kov, bring his hand up and pinch the bridge of his nose while the Great One merely raised his brow.
"Speak plainly." The Great One declared, in a manner close to those of the higher castes of Tectum. In the time she had spent here, Kha noticed that the Great One had a habit of speaking to people in a formal manner as a matter of instinct.
He looked towards her expectantly.
"I fear we may be in danger of being assaulted by a Necromancer. Perhaps even a cadre of them." she announced. This drew blank stares from the Great One and the boy.
"Explain."
"Gladly, Great One. Necromancy, simply put, is the 'art' of using the Great Ocean to interact with the dead. This may range from simply summoning the spirit of one long past for advice, to resurrecting the dead."
Kha could see no doubt in his eyes. No talk about how spirits didn't exist or how they were folly. He had seen her abilities first hand.
"I see. And you say we are in danger of being attacked? Is my father in danger of the same?" He asked her, his voice calm. That was the thing about the Great One. Kha had found that the calmer he sounded, the angrier he was in actuality. So the calm in his voice didn't bode well. Did he blame her for not having been informed earlier?
Kha looked at his aura through her wytch sight. He was not angry, but annoyed. Not at her, but having a new threat to combat. And he was worried for his father.
"I do not know, Great One." Kha said finally. "What I see through my wytch-sight is an unease that has spread across the planet, a malignancy that indicates to me that necromancy or something close to it has been practised frequently, and in such great numbers that the planet is foul with the energies of the dea-"
The apparatus on his arm glowed before a klaxon rang. The Great One put his hand up, to forestall her.
"My Father calls me." he said, before he brought his arm up and the image of Isaac, in a room she would soon forget, appeared above his wrist.
"Esau." The image spoke. "The bodies are gone."
-Isaac
"I see." Esau managed, before looking away from the screen in annoyance before looking back. "I think I may know the cause. Kha says we are in danger of being attacked by necromancers and as I understand it, necromancy deals-"
"-with the dead." I finished for him. "Is she sure?"
From outside the view of the screen, I had a voice speak. It was Kha's. "I feel the currents of necromancy or something very close to it."
"What do you mean 'something close to it'?"
"I mean that the currents of the Great Ocean I see are like those that surround necromancers. It could not be necromancy at all but whatever it is, the boundaries between life and death are being circumvented somehow."
That was a problem. None of us were equipped to deal with anything mystical, much less anything like this seemed to be, besides Kha herself. The last thing I wanted to come across today was a damned zombie or something. Possibilities ran through my mind at a mile a minute until I thought of something.
"Kha, are there any signs that necromancy has been performed? That a lay person like can use to tell if it has been performed, I mean."
"Not really." she said. "There is typically a need of a sacrifice to perform it, along with a need of items to open the connection to the Great Ocean,"
"Items like?"
"It depends. For basic spirit summoning, you may need chalk or blood to draw a ritual circle along with a small sacrifice of some kind along with some candles. For more intensive forms of necromancy, you would need a bigger sacrifice.``
That was disturbing, but overall good news. There was no chalk, wax or blood besides what we had left here, so there was a good chance nothing like the worst case scenario had been performed here.
"There are none of those here so it's unlikely that necromancy was performed here."
"Then perhaps the bodies were taken to someplace else where the necromancer has easier access to his tools." That made sense.
"Perhaps." I said, then a thought occurred to me. I looked at the keypad. It looked like there were puncture marks surrounding the keypad that weren't there before. "Esau, did you lock the keypad?"
"No I didn't." He said. "I didn't see the point. No one besides us is likely to know the Drukhari language and if any of the Drukhari survived, they would know to access the keypad anyway."
"Then the keypad was hacked."
"How did you come to that conclusion?"
"There are four punctures surrounding the keypad that weren't there before. It looks like something was attached to the keypad to force the pods open."
"I need to search the ship again, then expand the search from there. It would be foolish to follow the trail of whoever stole the bodies but we need to know where they are and who they are." I said.
"I agree." Esau concurred. "Do you need my help?"
"No, I don't think I do." I said, almost reflexively. Necromancy or not, I would not have Esau face this threat alongside me.
"I'll coordinate the drones to search the area, while I verify what they find myself. We don't know when the Orks will pop up. It could be in a few hours or in a few months so keep working on the wall." Even as I said it, my reasoning felt hollow.
The real reason was simple. I felt ashamed that I'd had to rely on Esau so much. I could feel him about to protest and interjected just before he could.
"Just in case, get one of the hoverbikes ready. If anything goes down, I'll call you. And if nothing goes down, I'll call you regardless. Alright, Esau?" That mollified him somewhat.
"Alright, Father. I will also be monitoring your health on the omni-tool." That was fair enough.
"See you later, Esau." I said, before dropping the call. I would have to have a candid conversation about this later. I turned around and left the room. It was time to get to it.
I ordered the drones to begin the search. There was no telling what I was actually looking for. What did a necromancer look like anyway? I had the mental image of a gruesome figure, stick thin and disgusting, digging at graveyards but for all I knew, they looked nothing like that. It was also possible, however unlikely, that it wasn't a necromancer that took their bodies in the first place.
All I knew was that whoever took the bodies had some technical prowess which told me precisely nothing about who they were exactly. I had them search for general life signs and signs of general disturbances in the ship.
It took all of five minutes before I realised that the whole ship was filled with signs of disturbances. The Drukhari and Ork bodies, that we could find anyway, were already burnt but the ship was filled with areas where the Drukhari or their slaves had died. This left dried blood stains and blood puddles all over the ship which the drones had flagged.
I tried to narrow it down to places that have been visibly disturbed within the last 24 to 48 hours. The scanners on the drones, as I found out, lacked the capability to do so, and even if they did have the capability, they lacked the software or the processing ability to transform that data to anything actually concrete. I would have to do the majority of the work myself.
I had the omnitool mark any entrances and exits that the drones found on the map I had of the ship. There were a total of five that the average person could fit through, besides the large hole in the ship's hull that we had used as ours. Two were large enough for even an Ork to fit through, while the other three would need the average person to squeeze themselves through.
I explored all of them, occasionally finding weaponry or random knick knacks that the drones had missed. I marked those for later collection and analysis by one of the MAMs.
Quite a few rooms were blocked off by debris, which I cleared out using the build gun. In those rooms I would sometimes find dead Drukhari bodies, either crushed by the impact of the ship crashing into the Orks or crashing into the planet. These bodies I marked on my omni-tool for burning.
There were no more human bodies, even in other stasis pods. Whoever or whatever had taken the bodies, only cared about taking the humans.
Briefly, I found myself wondering if some of the people that were in the now empty stasis pods were alive before being taken. If so, could we have taken them in as we did Kov and Kha? We likely could have, if I hadn't taken the decision to go home as soon as we found them. If I hadn't considered a few injuries enough reason to go home and forget about the ship. If only.
I hoped that wherever they were, these people, that they were okay. I quieted the voice in my mind that told me that they weren't and that it was my fault.
After spending a few hours exploring the ship. I found nothing that indicated the presence of anything other than myself. I did find a few more rooms blocked off from the rest of the ship by debris containing more technology we could work from along with a room that could be considered the engine room. I marked those down and then returned to the room that I had found Kov and Kha in.
I called Esau, both in frustration and as part of our agreed check-in.
"Father." He said in way of greeting. Looking at the background of the image, I could see that he had barely moved. Knowing him, he was still working through the use of drones, but it looked like I underestimated how worried he was. "Have you found anything?"
"No." I admitted. "I haven't. I found some Drukari bodies that need burning and pieces of technology we could use, though."
"I see. It seems that whoever this person was, they didn't care about the Drukari bodies." I hummed in agreement.
"Whoever took the bodies has likely long left the ship then." he continued.
"I agree. They could theoretically still be on the ship but I see no reason they would be."
"Have you begun a search of the areas surrounding the ship and the crash site?"
"No, I haven't. There are at least five exits that I found leading away from the ship besides the one we used. Starting a search without first identifying where they may have gone would largely be an exercise in futility."
"So what are you going to do?"
"Okay, here, I need your help." His eyes light up. Sometimes, because of his sheer ability and intelligence, it was difficult to remember that Esau wasn't even a month old.
I fabricated an omni-tool with no eezo, like the ones Esau made, using the build gun. I asked Esau to do the same. Then I attached the new omni-tool to the keypad, where it would relay any information it had to Esau's omni-tool. I chose to use newly fabricated omni-tools because I didn't know if the hacked Drukhari systems had viruses that could damage our systems in some way.
Esau connected the two omni-tools to the keypad and began work. Almost immediately, the projected screens of both my omni-tool and his turned red and beeped, signifying the presence of multiple viruses in the system. Esau was able to quarantine a few of them, keeping the omni-tools operational but the omni-tools would have to be destroyed after we used them here. If they were ever connected to our systems, we would basically be out of computers to use.
A weakness in our systems we would have to work on.
Still, the viruses had destroyed whatever encryption systems were present on the keypad and likely the ship, as the viruses had spread throughout all connected systems. This would allow us to access all the data present on the ship. We wouldn't be able to download the data directly, but we would be able to access and read it, which was excellent.
As soon as we figured this out, I decided to travel to the engine room to see if we could find a route to the leader of the vessel's cabins. In the engine room, I had seen some schematics of the ship as a whole, which would make the whole endeavour easier. Here, we could possibly find something resembling surveillance cameras.
I reasoned that for almost any civilization, methods of surveillance would exist. Especially when the civilization seemed to rely only on slave trade as a major backbone of their economy as the Drukhari did, or seemed to, anyway.
I travelled to the engine room, and after Esau deciphered the markings on the schematics, I made my way there through ruined corridors where I marked more items for collection and analysis. Along the way, I found myself making startling connections between the technologies I was seeing and how they were used. I saw multiple tesseracts and pyramids, which based on some of the designs being similar to the essence collectors, could trap entire souls.
This shouldn't have been startling to me, the Drukhari had many weapons that could literally steal years of life at a distance after all, but it was. Perhaps part of why it was startling was because as a result of my increased intellect and reverse engineering ability, I could build them too, and I could build them better. A part of me didn't know what to do with that information, but a part of me wanted to work on that technology and use it on myself.
I had used Ork essence to try to force my implants into a state where they would allow me to match Esau afterall, working off of half baked theories about how Esau's body functioned. And now the Ork essence was having unwanted and unseen effects, like forcing my growth to increase to some undefined limit. What else was the Ork essence doing? What did it mean for the Great Ocean to consider me an Ork? I needed to know, and these soul traps could be the first step to me figuring it out.
They could also prove a valuable weapon in fighting a possible necromancer.
I continued to make my way through the ship, navigating my way through crushed and warped hallways until I found the captain's quarters. Like the rest of the ship, it was filled with baubles that stood as testament to the Drukhari's sadistic sensibilities. Knives, hooks and chains lined the walls. Many of them still had blood dripping off of them. I looked closer. The blood was still clinging to the weapons even after over a week of disuse. These things were tools of exsanguination most likely.
Sunlight was let into the room by a hole where a small chunk of the ship's hull was missing. The chunk was too small to compromise hull integrity of the ship, even in space, but it was big enough to have caused explosive decompression here, which was likely why there were no bodies in this room.
It took some searching around the room, and some direction from Esau before I found myself accessing the captain's command console. Here, I let Esau do his thing again, until we found what we were looking for. The ship was continuously recording video from select areas around the ship. It was also attempting to transmit the video somewhere, but thankfully the crash had destroyed whatever transmitter the ship used. It didn't capture footage from all areas in the ship because many of the surveillance devices used had been destroyed in the crash. Thankfully, what the ship was able to capture was more than illuminating.
"Alright, let's reverse the footage until the day we arrived on the ship. Then we'll work forwards from then on." I thought about watching footage from earlier on, but with Esau seeing what I was seeing, it was a bad idea. Any earlier footage would show either torture, a typical pastime for the Drukhari, or people dying. He had already seen too much death already and if the trend continued, would have to see more. It would be up to me to limit that as much as possible.
The footage on screen largely stayed the same, besides the presence of dead bodies lining the corridors. We slowly went through the footage until we saw ourselves explore the ship. God, I looked awful. I was dirty, my hair was unkempt and even in the grainy darkness, I could see a tiredness in my own eyes. Esau, as always, looked impossibly immaculate despite his humble attire.
We skipped through the footage, right past us finding and freeing Kha and Kov until we reached the point we exited the ship and continued past that point until we saw movement.
We saw three Orks walk through the corridors from a different entrance on what looked like the other side of the ship, taking everything that wasn't nailed down. A squabble broke out over who had the better loot before one of the Orks took out a gun from a holster on its hip and shot the other Orks dead before taking selected items and leaving.
That was potentially problematic. At least one of Gritzz's boyz was still alive. I was thinking up multiple reasons why we hadn't heard from the Ork in question - even the most stealthy of Orks were barely subtle after all - until the answer presented itself.
The Ork flew into the frame of the camera, having been sent flying back into the ship at high speed. The Ork stood up, and just as it recovered, the figure entered into frame.
It looked somewhat like a cartoonish caricature of a human being dressed as a snail. Its limbs were long and thin, and had a metal shine to them. They looked almost skeletal and tapered off into thin points. It was almost twice the width of the Ork and even taller with its torso covered by a black robe. That put it at something like four metres tall from what I could see. It had no facial features besides one unblinking glowing eye and a mouth that was filled with sharp needle-like teeth. It carried a jar-like apparatus on its back, blue and semi transparent. In it I could see what looked like bones, human ones at that.
As the Ork stood up, recovering from the blow, the hands of the metal creature opened up through invisible seams into a set of long, thin hinged finger-like tendrils. The tendrils hit the Ork and it was taken apart in an almost clinical manner. Soon all that was left was its head and bloody viscera.
The metal creature picked the head up, examined it, threw it onto the floor and stepped on it, crushing it entirely. It then continued to walk through the corridors, swaying as it did.
We watched it travel through the corridors examining every single body it met. Ork and Drukhari bodies, it ignored entirely. Human bodies, on the other hand, were stuffed into the jar on its back. Luckily, for the humans it ran into and my conscience, they were all dead.
Each stasis pod was opened up with one of its 'hands' turning into a configuration of metal that stabbed into the keypads, presumably infecting them with a series of viruses. It then collected more bodies from the pods, stuffing them into the jar in a grotesque display. Then when the jar was full, the creature left with no fanfare.
As it left, I saw something that chilled my blood. One of Esau's drones flew past it, its body in the way of the drones flight path. The creature simply swatted the drone out of its path and continued on its way.
"Esau, did you see anything like that on drones' video feed?"
"No I did not, Father."
"So whatever this creature is, it's invisible to our surveillance systems. We need to get that fixed as soon as possible."
"I will work on fixing it now." I glanced to him. He was visibly frustrated.
Modifying the drones would barely be any work for him. Maybe a minute of altering the design to include Drukhari sensors before reclaiming each drone and rebuilding it with the build gun. Even at a hundred drones, that would be fifteen minutes at work at most with the improved build gun. What frustrated him wasn't the work. It was that he had to do it in the first place.
He blamed himself. The drones were his design, so the fact that they hadn't noticed this creature felt like a personal slight against his ability. In reality it was barely an inconvenience but in his mind it was like he had failed, and Esau never failed.
"It's alright, son. We'll work on a new drone design together." From the look on his face, you would have thought that I had slapped him.
"You don't trust me to work on the drones alone?" he asked, his voice absent from emotion at the end.
Ah, shit.
I knew that Esau had a complex mix of a superiority and an inferiority complex. He found it difficult to see the positive traits in people. It was easy to see why when he was so better than everyone at everything. Something that would take an ordinary person months of work to perfect took him a short afternoon. In the same vein because he was so gifted, any shortcoming on his part, real or perceived, was devastating.
I could almost see it now. Minor issues would build on each other in his mind until they became insurmountable. Every time he would try to correct any perceived errors until his corrective actions became far worse than the actual error.
I had thought his issues would be something I would have time to work on. Over years where I would help reinforce his self image while steering him away from a path that would ultimately become self destructive.
I saw now that I had months at most. If I didn't take the first steps to getting him away from that kind of thinking soon, he would be hurting himself and others trying to reach a standard that was increasingly impossible to obtain.
"I do, son. I know that you could modify all the drones in what, ten minutes?"
He frowned. "Less."
"Less than that even." It felt mildly patronising to say but I was pushing him away from talk that put himself down. Bringing up a talent we both knew he was good at would work to reinforce his image of himself. Working on his self image now, before he really spiralled, was the best option here.
"Your ability to modify the drones was never in question. I just wanted to work on the drones with you because I thought it would be fun." He didn't snort per se, but it was a close thing.
"Come on, Esau. Do you remember the first time you tried to show me how you made your own omni-tool?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm a bit smarter now than I was back then. I wanted to work with you on a few projects together. Just me and you. No Kha and no Kov. How does that sound?" I could see him mull it over.
"Any project we would work on would benefit from having more people helping."
"That is true, but I didn't hear a 'no'." He snorted,
"I guess that I didn't actually say it." That was that then, for now at least.
"Make a list of stuff you would like to work on with me, then we'll work on them as soon as possible, alright?"
"Alright, Father." Alright.
Now we had to look at the rest of this footage and figure out what the hell was going on. It was clear that we had missed much of what was going on around us. We had assumed the planet was empty, besides ourselves and the Orks that were no doubt building up their infrastructure hidden in the mountains or some other corner of the world. We were wrong.
In hindsight, it made sense that there were other living creatures. Within 24 hours of me arriving here, Esau's pod crash landed, followed by both the Orks and the Drukhari. The debris scattered all over had told me that that was a fairly common occurrence. Assuming that most of this debris was a result of the equivalent of space trash, there was a good chance of at least one species landing on this planet and building a culture here. This is without the possibility of an alien species being native to the planet itself.
We skipped past the video, taking note of the entrance and exit the creature used. An avenue for future investigation. Kha had said that necromancy or something like it was being performed here on this planet in what she thought was likely large numbers. The creature had collected the bodies of human beings. It didn't take a genius to put two and two together.
The creature was collecting human bodies from the crashes and was taking them somewhere to bring them back to life. Based on what I had seen, it was likely doing this through technological means.
I would have thought it insane, but the Drukhari had items that directly messed with people's souls. Bringing people back from the dead was only a single step above that.
Why they would do it was less of a mystery. It could be any number of reasons. More people meant more resources to draw from, both mental and physical. That was if whatever process was used kept the mind intact in the first place.
We kept looking through the video. The creature didn't return.
We had noted the direction it had left in, but besides a stray thought to follow the creature, I decided to leave it alone. Despite how much I was disgusted by it, following it would be a bad idea. We also didn't know what kind of support the creature had. It could be alone, but it likely wasn't. Fighting it could be a walk in the park, especially with my new enhancements, or it could be the most difficult fight I ever had.
A man who has not prepared his children for his own death has failed as a father, and I was unwilling to fail Esau by dying before my time arrived. Or any time at all, in fact.
I stood up to leave. Immediately, I staggered as I saw a flash of green in my vision. It looked like a better fight would be coming to me soon.
I froze. I reached up to feel my facial expression. I was smiling. Shit.
I hurried my way out of the ship. The Orks would be attacking soon.
-?
The Artisan walked through the sands of the wastelands towards the mountain valleys that hid the City of Bone. The walk was long, and even though it was carrying what could be the future of the City, it was unhurried.
Haste made for waste after all.
It walked for hours on end, days by its count before it reached the ravine that served as the direct road to the City. Here it ignored the vermin that vied for its attention, begging for any scraps that might fall from its hands. Once, the vermin were human, hundreds of years ago, but generations of living in the tunnels of the valleys had changed them. One of the vermin felt adventurous and tried stealing from the Artisan's collection of biological material and was dismantled for his trouble. The Artisan left its remains for the rest of the vermin to consume when hunger inevitably consumed them.
The collection of biological material was tedious work, and especially dangerous when collecting from the wastelands but it was rewarding, when the stars aligned. And from the collection of material collected by it, it seemed that they had. This particular stock was as pure as was possible, untouched by the curses of the waste. The Artisan would be rewarded greatly for its work.
The Artisan travelled through the ravine, navigating the jagged rocks. sandy peaks and dark tunnels. Some of the knowledge deciphered from ancient texts had indicated that this ravine was once a place where water flowed, freely and unrestricted. Personally, the Artisan doubted it. Naufrag was a cursed place. It was hard to imagine something as holy as water flowing freely here at any point.
The sentries on each side of the ravine, dressed in the flesh cloth typical of the City of Bone, spotted it and began playing the drums that would announce its return, but the Artisan ignored them. They were vermin as well, though they had ascended through the flesh pits, and thus were below it.
Slowly, it began to feel the low vibrations of the music as it travelled down the ravine, signalling the mountain clans to ready themselves for its arrival. The Artisan felt a shadow of a smile dance across its features, hidden from all through the chassis that it was interred in. It made a point to show off the material in its collection because it knew that they had not expected it to return with as many biological samples as the sentries had no doubt reported.
The more it walked, the louder the drums became and soon the drums were supplemented by the singing of the women of the valleys, the Sisters of Bone. They were readying themselves for its arrival. Good. That meant it did not need to wait for the ritual to begin.
Soon, the Artisan arrived at the threshold separating the City of Bone from the rest of the mountains and after walking past the sentries that stood as security, found itself walking on floors of welcome metal again. Over part of the hull of one of the ship that the ancients had arrived in.
Here, the Artisan began to hear the Orator speak.
"The Artisan comes to us, my brethren!" the Orator said in his typical noisy manner. The Artisan understood the need for ritual for without it, the Way of Flesh could not be preserved but did the Orator need to be so vociferous?
The Artisan navigated the labyrinthian corridors that led to the City proper and heard the Orator speak again.
"It comes to us, my brethren!" the Orator exclaimed again. This time the voice was accompanied by the sounds of exclamations of men, women and children alike. The City of Bone was celebrating. The Artisan sped up, it was a point of personal pride that it had never been so late as to miss the third exaltation. The Artisan exited the corridors, into the Arena where the people of the city shivered in jubilation all around it, just as the third exaltation began.
"It comes to us, my brethren!" the Orator exclaimed for the third time. Now the citizens of the City of Bone were near euphoric as they had seen it arrival.
"It arrives, my brethren. So let us be ready for it."
At the sound of this, the ritual began, The citizens; men, women and children alike consumed from a chalice that was in front of them by the Sisters of Bone. Immediately, they began to convulse in the stands as the fluid travelled through their bodies. Some fell off the stands, into the arena proper from the force of the convulsions. Almost as one, the convulsions stopped and the people died; man, woman and child alike, died.
Here, the Sisters started to sing. It was a beautiful song, of conquering death, and bringing life. Even a creature such as the Artisan felt its spirits buoy. It was like quenching your thirst after spending months in the desert. It was perfect. The people, dead, just minutes ago, awakened as if to hear the song of the sisters.
The song ended and the Artisan returned to reality. It looked to the stands and saw that all who had died had returned to life. Good. It meant that all of them had kept the faith. This was fortuitous indeed.
As the song ended, the people in the stand began their part of their ritual, biting their tongues to draw blood and letting it flow from them and into the chalices that sat in front of them.
The blood flowed from the chalices, through microtubules down into the ziggurat in the middle of the arena. Here, the Artisan was ready. It removed the container from its back and carefully arranged the bodies at the entrance of the ziggurat, laying them into the depressions present in the ancient stone. Some of the bodies lacked the organs and humours necessary for the ritual, but the Artisan was in luck.
It had collected many bodies, all of them pure. That was almost unheard of and had been a feat he knew the other Artisans would not match when it was time to return. The Artisan substituted organs from bodies that were less suitable where possible and began work, connecting the bodies to the systems of metal that were hidden in the stone.
The ziggurat was ancient, even more than the ancients that had settled here thousands of years ago, and many of its uses were unknown. What was known, however, was that the ziggurat would return any man to life, as long as it was fed blood and as long as the sacrifice was of a high enough quality.
The Artisan held hope that the materials collected were suitably pure. If they weren't, it meant that some other Artisan would have the honour of having collected the materials necessary to awaken the Golden One. An honour unmatched throughout all of time, for what could match the achievement of awakening a god?
They had learnt long ago, that the vermin that abounded Naufrag's wastelands just did not suffice as material for the ziggurat. The clan leaders had claimed that it was because they were not worthy. The Artisan's predecessor had instead theorised that it was because they were diseased and sickly, from generations of interacting unprotected with the materials that landed periodically on Naufrag.
His work done, the Artisan stood up and signalled that his part of the work was done. The Orator nodded from atop the ziggurat and began to speak. For all that it disliked him, the Artisan had to admit that the Orator looked splendid. He was dressed in a humble flesh cloth robe, created in the bio-forges as was tradition, accented by a golden necklace and a gold bangle on his right arm. His head was shaved clean, showing the runes tattooed onto his head by the sisters of bone. He spoke, his voice spreading throughout the arena via the arcane effects of the necklace..
"The Artisan had returned to us!" Here there was an applause, which the Orator allowed to continue for some time. "It has returned to us! From the perilous, diseased wastelands where even our vermin kin avoid. Yes, my brethren. The Artisan comes to us from Star Fall!"
Again, the applause rose anew.
"And as was prophesied by our Sisters, it brings back components needed to awaken the Golden One! We find ourselves at the precipice of greatness, my brethren. We find ourselves close to apotheosis. So close, oh so close." The Orator paused so that the people could consider his words. After a moment or two, he continued.
"For hundreds of years, we have fed the Golden One and we have been rewarded! Our kin below us-" He stamped his feet for emphasis. "-shun us! They see us as beasts! As savages!"
He laughed, and the people laughed with him.
"They are fools. They think themselves above us, and yet they lock themselves away, below us." He paused again, letting the crowd laugh. "They do not know the Ways of Flesh, as we do! They do not know the Song of Bone! They have never felt the blessings of the Golden One! When they die, they are not revived! When they die, they stay dead."
Here, he momentarily affected a saddened face before it turned into a face filled with anger.
"But do not pity them! They shun us! They shun the Way! For this, they will not achieve absolution! Today is the day! When the Golden One awakes, He will destroy them, and lead us across the stars!" The people erupted into a raucous cheer, one that even the Artisan found itself a part of.
"Let us begin." The Orator opened his arms wide and looked to the sky. The Sisters began to sing. This one was a song of victory, and of absolution. The bodies in the stone depression awoke and began to scream. The Golden One had accepted this offering. The Artisan was awed.
This was what it had lived its whole life for. What it had sacrificed its body for. What it had become trapped in its metal chassis for. It's god had finally been fed enough to awaken. Light shone from beneath the ziggurat, engulfing the whole arena in a white light. It was time.
Within the ziggurat, the Golden Man stirred.
Notes:
9.1. Perk(s) earned this chapter
None.
A/N: I will be taking some time this week to edit the previous chapters. This wont affect my schedule but it has been clear upon rereading that there have been various typos that need fixing.
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